Windows Phone Market Place Coming to South Africa

Last week at the MIX 11 conference in Las Vegas there were some huge announcements around Windows Phone during the second Keynote of the event. The first one was about the new features of the next release of the operating system “Mango”. These features include:

Internet Explorer 9 coming to Windows Phone – with the same code base and features as the desktop with some minor differences specific to the phone (no Activex support for example). This brings HTML5 rendering engine to the phone. It includes hardware acceleration, although taking into account smaller GPU.

Live tile enhancements such as multiple Live tiles per app, deep linking, …

Silverlight 4

Sockets

Ringtone API

Raw camera feed access to applications

SQL CE: in-memory local SQL database for ease of data applications

Additions to developer tooling: new Location tooling, Accelerometer tooling, profiler and support for Silverlight and XNA in the same project

Marketplace: going from 16 to 35 countries with Marketplace for consumers, 30 to 35 countries for devevlopers selling apps

New languages support

…

The other huge piece of information that was announced was that South Africa is in the list of countries which will be getting Market Place!! I would like to thank every one for their feedback. It took a lot of pushing from team locally to get us on the list but its coming! The timeline is around the same time as the next version of the OS. This is around the northern hemisphere’s fall or our spring. You can see the keynotes from the event here: